Game of Queens

"There are 2 unresolved questions at the heart of the Purim story: 1) What happened to Queen Vashti, after she refused her husband's demand to present herself at the king's banquet? 2) How could pinch hitter Queen Esther love and live happily ever after with a king who had callously condemned an entire people to genocide, seemingly on a whim?<br/><br/>India Edghill attempts to resolve these plot points with backstories for her 3 narrators: Vashti, Esther, and chief eunuch Hegai. She also provides a convenient villainess in King Achhasverus's scheming mother, who turns out to be in cahoots with Haman.<br/><br/>While Edghill's additions make the idyllic ending slightly more plausible, she is not the strongest storyteller, and the characters do not come alive as much as one would hope. While I sympathized with Vashti as a precocious and willful child bride, her relationship with Achhasverus never really pops; his underdeveloped character makes it tough to believe that the independent Esther would fall madly in love with him at first sight. Mordecai is a prudish patriarch who curbs Esther's proto-feminist longings; his forcing her to enter the royal sex-and-beauty contest is thus jarringly out of character. Esther enters the story too late to have much impact; her friendship with Vashti is believable, but the idea that a horse loving, mathematically inclined scholar and linguist would meekly succumb to queenly domesticity reminds one of a 50s' teen romance novel.<br/><br/>Only Hegai, a shadowy puppetmaster in the Biblical tale, emerges with anything like a believable character arc. The tragic events leading to his position as chief eunuch speak poignantly to the lingering effects of trauma, and the difficulty of letting go of caustic anger and revenge."